European Protestants Between Anti-Communism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Other Interwar Kulturkampf?

Abstract

In the late 1930s, Protestants across Europe debated how best to resist the threat of encroaching secularism and radical secular politics. Some insisted that communism remained the greatest threat to Europe’s Christian civilization, while others used new theories of totalitarianism to imagine Nazism and communism as different but equal menaces. This article explores debates about Protestantism, secularism, and communism in three locations – Hungary, Germany, and Great Britain. It concludes that Protestants perceived Europe’s culture war against secularism in very different ways, according to their geopolitical location. The points of conflict between Europe’s Protestants foreshadowed the dramatic shifts in the coordinates of Protestant Europe’s culture wars after 1945.